FlameFlower Short Story

photo by Tantra

Alisonby John Olson

I'm 5' 9,” a man of average height, early 40s, graying on the edges. Alison, when we dated, was 50' 7” tall, and weighed a little under 1200 lbs. She was dainty. At least, for her height. I guess you could say she was a bit on the thin side. But curves? Oh my god she had curves.

I took her to dinner on our first date. We had to go to a seaside restaurant near Malibu so that Alison could sit cross-legged on the beach. She wore a dress of her own making. She called it a “skyscraper dress.” It had a deep scoop neckline on front, and a center back zipper. The pull tab and slider, which was made of brass, must have weighed 135 lbs. The zipper had been made at the Globe Iron Foundry in Commerce. Globe did everything from automotive components to food processing equipment. They were happy to make her a zipper.

The zipper was expensive, but everything in Alison's world was expensive. Money was not a problem. She was very popular with construction outfits. She did most of the work that was normally done by crane. Only Alison was able to do it much faster. Workers just had to shout what they needed and she would pick it up and put it where they wanted as easy as if she were playing with a doll set.

I wanted dinner to be special on our first date. I had an 8 oz. filet mignon with potato risotto, chanterelle mushroom, and grilled asparagus. Alison had the seafood paella with prawns, mussels, Manilla clams, scallops, chorizo, chicken, and saffron rice in a seafood broth. She was served the equivalent of eight servings. They put it in a huge cauldron which was brought down to the beach by flatbed truck. She also drank ten bottles of wine. Our bill came to something like $10,000 dollars. I don't remember. I was pretty tipsy when we left. Alison carried me home. There was no need to drive. She could travel ten miles in ten minutes. She merely had to be careful not to step on any cars or trucks.

Sex was difficult. Kissing didn't work at all. We tried it. But she felt nothing. My lips against hers were like two little electrons brushing the skin of a dolphin. There was no sensation other than that of my hair tickling her upper lip. The air streaming down from her nose made me uncomfortably hot. I tried to avoid looking up through her nostrils, but a morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I got a glance at the two caverns at the bottom of her nose. It was less than scenic.

Cunnilingus and intercourse were pretty much one and the same thing. The size of my penis compared to the size of her vagina was not a viable match. I would don a wet suit and insert my entire body into her vagina, hold my breath, and search for her clitoris. Her clitoris was easy to find. It was the size of a basketball. I had to satisfy myself when I was finished. She felt strongly that sexual gratification should be mutual. But there was little that she could do. I tried bouncing up and down on her breast, but it simply gave her a bruise, and did nothing to stimulate me erotically. I felt bashful about masturbating in front of her, but eventually I grew accustomed to the practice, and went at vigorously while cradled between her gigantic breasts.

She tried not to laugh. But she couldn't help it. The agitations of my body between her breasts was ticklish. Once, she laughed so hard I was blown clear across the room, and was lucky to land with my buttocks against the wall.

I can't remember why we broke apart. I tried to be patient about a number of Alison's habits. She was frequently late, and when we went somewhere, it would take her hours to get ready. She used massive quantities of eye shadow and lipstick, quantities hard to supply in the devices required for application. Her tube of lipstick had been manufactured by a special company and was roughly the size of a conduit, or rocket ship.

She came close to stepping on me a number of times. She tended to be absent-minded. At first, she apologized profusely, but after a while it began to irritate her. She said I did it purposively to remind her of her unequal status in our relationship.

What do you mean by unequal status, I asked, utterly perplexed.

She said my constant deference diminished her. She hated it. It made her feel small.

Small?

Yes, small, she said. You make me feel awkward. Why can't you sit on my shoulder more often?

Because I'm not a parakeet, I said.

Well, that last remark was what did it. She loved little animals, but could not live with them. The risk was too great. But the real reason she felt so aggrieved at this remark was because she was convinced that her femininity is what brought about the best in a man. And I failed her in this respect.

She was right. I had been unbending about a number of things, including taking a bath with her. But what really bugged her was my unending wariness. My overweening concern, the grandeur of my solicitude. My colossal, overbearing scrutiny. She could not achieve intimacy with a man whose arrogant, day-to-day deference made her feel so inadequate. So stunted. So small.

I still see her occasionally, from afar, her head towering above the buildings, bent down, her eyes with their own worried regard, the bruised self-esteem of someone who craves the gentle wine of anonymity.

John Olson on "Alison"

My primary value in all writing is alterity. Otherness. Strangeness. What the Russian writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky termed ostranenie, which means defamiliarization, and is the technique of inducing an audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar. All art does this to one degree or another. The effect is particularly pronounced among some of the writers and artists at the beginning of the 20th century. Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons are examples of converting the familiar into the unfamiliar. In the literary arts, this might consist of disrupting conventional syntax, as Stein did in Tender Buttons, or fusing common words to make new words, as Joyce did in Finnegans Wake.

Fiction writers such as Lawrence Sterne, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf have departed from conventional plot structure to focus the reader’s attention on the medium of language itself. I would characterize the bulk of my writing as incorporating these tendencies. Stein has been a seminal influence. People have a tendency to characterize my writing as surrealist, but while surrealism has also been a wellspring of inspiration for me, it is the more Cubistic writing of Stein that has propelled my writing. I should also mention the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrar, and Guillaume Apollinaire. In the same way that Cubism slashed and broke up shape and volume to create a mode of perception closer to that of actual life, in which many different sensations are experienced at once, the aforementioned writers shattered conventional poetic structure to convey a sense of ongoing, continuous simultaneity. Jack Kerouac gave this strategy further impetus with his notion of “bop spontaneity.” This was a feverish attention to language as a driving force for which Neil Cassady’s manic appetites and driving became a symbol.

“Alison,” as a few other of my recent fictions, has been a departure in the opposite direction. Which is to say the desire to construct a narrative on more conventional standards: a beginning, a middle, and an end, and to give an attention to sentence structure according to its more conventional modes, à la Gustaf Flaubert, whose sentences are so beautifully crafted. In this sense, the project became experimental for me. I’ve been so accustomed to doing just the opposite. This is not to say I wanted something tame. Au contraire. I wanted something wildly eccentric. Carnivalesque. Strange. On this occasion I decided, rather than to make the familiar unfamiliar, I would make the unfamiliar familiar. This is not new. Writers such as Donald Barthelme, who published a great deal of his work in the New Yorker, hardly a venue of experimental writing, created stories premised on wildly eccentric situations, yet he had the knack of making these things appear weirdly normal. That’s the oxymoronic formula I had in mind for “Alison.” A story that inhabited the realm of the weirdly normal.

About John Olson

John Olson is the author of eight books of poetry and prose poetry, including Swarm of Edges (1996), Echo Regime (1999), Eggs & Mirrors (1999), Logo Lagoon (1999), Free Stream Velocity (2003), Oxbow Kazoo (2005), The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat (2006), and Backscatter: New And Selected Poetry (2008). He is also the author of two novels: Souls of Wind (2008), about the adventures of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West where he meets Billy the Kid, and The Nothing That Is (2010), an autobiographical novel written from the 2nd person point of view. The Seeing Machine, a novel about the French Cubist painter Georges Braque, is forthcoming from Quale Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays, stories, and prose poetry, is due out soon from Black Widow Press.

In 2004, Olson was the recipient of The Stranger Genius Award for Literature. He has also received three Fund For Poetry Awards and Souls Of Wind was shortlisted for a Believer magazine book of the year award.

John lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Roberta and their cat Toby. No actual book has been dropped on Toby. Toby’s feelings about Shakespeare remain private and mute, but his passion for treats and cherry pie are immodestly undisguised, and continue unabated.

What advance readers are saying about John Olson's upcoming: Larynx Galaxy!!!

"John Olson is afraid of no word or trope of words, and especially not of tropes of ideas looming into and out of one another. And no emotion or boundaryless compounding of emotions is beyond likelihood in the presence of his surging perceptions as they float in inspiration. Larynx Galaxy is also a syrinx galaxy playing on the panpipes of imagination."-Michael McClure

John Olson's Larynx Galaxy is a cross between The Poetics of Space and The Revolution of Everyday Life. It spins off both of these seminal texts and recreates a new Utopian boundary-free world in which all the senses are engaged simultaneously and the mind is a minefield where you (the reader) must proceed at your own risk. Olson is an encylopedist, a bricologist, an omnivore--the total package, as they say--in the tradition of The Pillow Book and Walden. He has written a text for the ages--brilliant, hallucinatory, clearheaded--verging on the edges of infinity, yet forever at home in the world. --- Lewis Warsh

"Olson is an original, and that accomplishment is an extraordinary feat at this point in the long history of literature. His prose poems do not remind me of anyone else's work. While elements of Surrealism are involved, he is not a Surrealist: while his non-narrative, exploding juxtapositions reveal a background awareness of Surrealism, thematic development is always present, so that a given work of one to three pages, unlike Language Poetry, does not erase itself as it proceeds; there is a floating focus that functions like a jungle gym. On this "gym," Olson displays his linguistic acrobatics, juxtaposing the totally unexpected with, to borrow Hart Crane's marvelous phrase, "the logic of metaphor." So a piece advances in several directions at once and concludes when its duration is sensed as complete." ----Clayton Eshleman

Our release of Backscatter: New and Selected Poems provides a good introduction to the prose poems of John Olson. Larynx Galaxy will take the reader to the next plane of the Olson experience.

Comments on John Olson's Backscatter, his prose poems and poetry:

"John Olson's poetry is a linguistic burlesque show. Every aspect of the English language gets done up in feathers and spangles to shimmy and titillate, and you can almost hear the bawdy trombone accenting John Olson's post-structuralist puns, his sonic shenanigans. He announces as much in the first line of this excellent compendium: '"The exhilaration of poetry is in its gall, its brassy irrelevence and gunpowder vowels, its pulleys and popcorn and delirious birds.'" ..Olson's far too playful a poet to ever get his critical due in polite society. Nonetheless, he is a true catawampus heir to the American lyric tradition of Dickinson, Poe, Stevens, and Ashbery (by way of Robert Desnos and Raymond Roussel, among many gleeful others)....These works have been selected astutely, and presented in a kind of Olson Omnibus...Firmly outside the academia, Olson isn't likely to appear in the critical constellations of a Helen Vendler or a Harold Bloom any time soon. So its up to what is affectionately known as the 'cult audience' to give him his due" ..........Travis Nichols. Please see his full page review of Backscatter in the literary magazine: Believer, which these snippets have been excerpted from.